The Courage to Be Disliked: A Business Perspective

Stop trying to be liked. Start trying to be respected. One is borrowed. The other is earned.

8 min read

There is a book sitting quietly on shelves across the world, a dialogue between a philosopher and a young man, that has the power to completely rewire how you think about success, leadership, and the choices you make every single day in business.

It’s called The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. It draws on the largely forgotten psychology of Alfred Adler. And while it reads like philosophy, what it actually is, underneath all the conversation, is a masterclass in business psychology that no MBA will teach you.

I want to break it down for you. Not as a book review. But as a business operator, an entrepreneur, a person who has felt the invisible leash of needing people to approve of them, and who has slowly, sometimes painfully, learned to cut it.

The most dangerous person in any boardroom is the one who needs to be liked.

First: Who Was Adler, and Why Does He Matter to You?

Alfred Adler was a contemporary of Freud and Jung, and yet history pushed him to the margins. Freud said your past determines who you are. Adler said something radical: your past has no power over you unless you let it.

This isn’t motivational poster talk. This is a structured psychological framework. Adler believed that most of our behavioural problems, including anxiety, people-pleasing, self-sabotage and conflict avoidance, come from one place: the desperate desire to belong, to be liked, to be accepted.

In business, this desire doesn’t look like weakness. It wears a perfectly pressed suit. It sounds like ‘let’s keep everyone happy.’ It shows up in the discount you gave because you were scared to hold the price. The decision you delayed because you didn’t want to upset a team member. The client you kept even though they were draining your business dry, because they were the first one who ever believed in you.

The Adlerian insight in one line: People who need to be liked cannot lead. Because leadership, at its core, is the willingness to make decisions that some people will disagree with and to do it anyway, because it’s right.

“All Problems Are Interpersonal Relationship Problems.”

This is one of the book’s central claims, and when I first read it, I nearly put the book down. It seemed too sweeping. But then I sat with it. I thought about every business problem I had encountered, in my own work, in conversations with peers, in businesses I had observed from the outside.

The startup that couldn’t scale: the founder refused to delegate because she was afraid employees would think she didn’t trust them. The restaurant that lost its identity: the chef kept changing the menu based on whatever a vocal minority of customers wanted that month. The sales team that consistently underperformed: a manager who couldn’t give hard feedback because he desperately needed his team to like him.

Every single time, underneath the business problem, was an interpersonal relationship problem. And underneath that problem was the same root: someone who lacked the courage to be disliked.

If you are always trying to be liked, you will never be able to do what needs to be done. You will do what is comfortable. And comfortable rarely builds anything worth remembering.

The Separation of Tasks: A Framework Every Business Owner Needs

Adler introduces a concept that I think is the single most practically useful idea in the book for anyone running a business or leading a team. He calls it the separation of tasks.

The idea is this: every situation in life has tasks, responsibilities that belong to specific people. Your task. Their task. And the root of most interpersonal suffering, in relationships, in workplaces, in leadership, is people either picking up tasks that don’t belong to them or abandoning tasks that do.

Ask yourself this: how much of your mental energy is spent worrying about other people’s tasks?

• Your task: Set the price you believe your work is worth.

Their task: Decide whether they want to pay it. You are not responsible for managing their reaction to your pricing. That is their task. The moment you start discounting to manage their feelings, you have picked up a task that doesn’t belong to you.

• Your task: Give honest, clear, direct feedback to your team.

Their task: Receive it, process it, and decide what to do with it. You are not responsible for ensuring they don’t feel bad. You are responsible for communicating clearly and respectfully. Anything beyond that, molding the message so much that the truth disappears, is you doing their emotional work for them.

• Your task: Make the decision that is right for the business.

Their task: Choose how to respond to that decision. A board that votes on a restructuring, a founder who exits a partnership, a manager who ends an underperforming relationship. These are leadership tasks. How others feel about those decisions is their task. Not yours.

• Your task: Show up with complete honesty in a pitch or proposal.

Their task: Decide whether to invest. When you start shaping the truth of your pitch to what you think they want to hear, you have both abandoned your task and taken on theirs. A double failure.

This framework is liberating in a way that is almost uncomfortable at first. Because it asks you to let go. To do your part fully, and then release the outcome. To stop trying to control how people receive what you put out into the world.

The Hidden Cost of Needing Approval

Let me be direct about something that the business world rarely puts into plain numbers: the need to be liked is one of the most expensive business expenses you will never see on a balance sheet.

Behaviour	Real Business Cost
Discounting your price to avoid awkward negotiation	Compressed margins, price-sensitive clients, a devalued brand
Keeping an underperforming employee to avoid conflict	Team morale erosion, lost productivity, resentment from high performers
Saying yes to every client request	Scope creep, burnout, diluted quality, loss of positioning
Avoiding a difficult conversation with a co-founder	Compounding misalignment, eventual explosive conflict, broken partnerships
Building what the crowd wants instead of your vision	A mediocre product that no one loves deeply
Hedging your opinion in every public communication	No clear brand voice, no loyal audience, no differentiation

Every one of these items is a real business cost. And every one of them traces back to the same source: the inability to tolerate being disliked, even briefly, even by someone who might be wrong about you.

Being Disliked Is Not the Same as Being Wrong

This is perhaps the most important distinction I want you to sit with. Our instincts, evolved over millennia in small tribes where social rejection literally meant death, have wired us to treat disapproval as danger. A raised eyebrow in a meeting feels like a threat. A critical comment on a post feels like an attack. A client who doesn’t renew feels like evidence that we’re not enough.

But in the modern business world, disapproval is often just information. And sometimes not even that. Sometimes it is simply someone’s preference, their fear, their jealousy, or their misunderstanding. None of which says anything real about your work or your worth.

Steve Jobs was disliked, intensely, by many, for his uncompromising standards. Every restaurant that has held to its vision in the face of online reviews demanding change has been disliked. Every entrepreneur who raised prices, closed underperforming product lines, or changed direction has been disliked. That disapproval was the price of integrity.

The question is never: Will some people dislike this?  The question is always: Is this the right thing to do?  Because if the answer to the second question is yes, then the answer to the first question becomes irrelevant. You do the right thing. You pay the social price. And you move forward.

Community Feeling: The Other Half of the Equation

Now, and this is where Adler’s philosophy gets misread, the courage to be disliked is not the same as not caring about people.

Adler speaks of what he calls Gemeinschaftsgefühl, community feeling or social interest. The idea that a well-functioning human being, and a well-functioning business, is grounded not in seeking approval from others but in genuinely contributing to others.

There is a profound difference between building a product because you want people to admire you for building it and building a product because you have identified a real problem and you genuinely want to solve it.

There is a difference between leading a team to be loved by them and leading a team because you are committed to their growth and to the work you are doing together.

There is a difference between creating content to get likes and creating content because you have something to say that will genuinely help someone.

The first version, in each case, is approval-seeking wearing a mask. The second version is genuine contribution. And the paradox, the beautiful and infuriating paradox, is that genuine contribution tends to generate far more respect, loyalty and even love than approval-seeking ever does.

When you stop chasing the approval of the room, something extraordinary happens. The right people in the room finally start paying attention.

What This Looks Like in Practice

I want to give you something concrete to take away. Here is what the courage to be disliked actually looks like in the day-to-day texture of running a business.

• A price increase sent without a twelve-paragraph justification.

Your work is worth more. Here is the new rate. Thank you for being a client.

• Declining a project that doesn’t align.

Without a week of agonising over whether they’ll be upset, whether they’ll tell others, whether you’ll regret it.

• Publishing your opinion. The real one.

Not the softened, hedged, everyone-can-agree version that will get polite likes from everyone and move no one.

• A performance conversation had in week two, not month nine.

With honesty and care. But without letting the fear of their discomfort stop you from doing what the situation requires.

• A brand that takes a position.

One that says, clearly, who it is for. Which means saying, implicitly, who it is not for. And being completely at peace with that.

The Freedom on the Other Side

Here is what I want to leave you with, because I think this is the part the book gets most right, and the part that business discourse talks about least.

When you stop managing the perceptions of people who are not in your corner anyway, you free up an enormous amount of energy. Mental energy. Emotional energy. Creative energy. Energy that was being spent crafting the right response, softening the right edge, worrying about the right interpretation.

That energy comes back to you. And you can pour it into the people who actually matter. Your real clients, your real team, your real work, your real vision. Into building something so good, so honest, so genuinely valuable that it doesn’t need everyone to love it. It just needs the right people to find it.

Adler would say this is not just better for business. It is the only way to live a life that is truly yours. Because a life organised around other people’s approval is not your life at all. It is a performance of a life, and a performance that never ends, and that no one, not even your audience, ever fully believes.

The courage to be disliked is not a rejection of people. It is a profound act of self-respect and, paradoxically, the most generous thing you can offer the people around you. Because when you show up as yourself, fully, without the armour of people-pleasing, you give everyone around you permission to do the same. And that is what real leadership feels like.

So: Do You Have the Courage to Be Disliked?

Not recklessly. Not unkindly. But honestly, and fully, and in service of something bigger than the temporary comfort of everyone’s approval.

Because the business and the life you actually want is almost certainly waiting on the other side of that courage.

Go read the book. It is short. It is strange. It is one of the most quietly radical things you will ever encounter. And then come back to your work, your team, your clients and see everything just a little bit differently.

Written with honesty, from Shrispeaks.com

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